The Corinthians director of football, Edu, has warned suitors off his midfielder Paulinho as they prepare to play Chelsea in Sunday's Fifa Club World Cup final. The club believe that their prize asset, far from being keen to move, is eager to remain at the financially prosperous São Paulo club.

Edu, who won two Premier League titles and three FA Cups in four years under Arsène Wenger at Arsenal, has fielded interest from clubs such as Internazionale, Paris St-Germain and Milan for the 24-year-old, and both Chelsea and Manchester City have scouted the player intensively to assess his suitability for Premier League football. Yet Corinthians are under no pressure to sell having signed a sponsorship deal with Nike earlier this week that is worth about £120m over 10 years, thought to be the largest in the history of Brazilian club football.

"Brazilian football is strong and the Brazilian economy is getting better," said Edu, who returned to the club in 2009 to finish his playing career where it had begun, and took up his off-field role two years later. "Our club is now one of the richest clubs in Brazil, that's for sure and we can keep good players like Paulinho. We can buy good players. That makes it an exciting time to be in Corinthians. It's a good place to be.

"We can keep him. The important thing for me is to see the player happy with the club. If he'd come up to me and said: 'Edu, I want to leave because I want to join another club or have another experience', I would have to respect that because that is football. I went to Arsenal, it is normal. But if I see him happy it is easy to keep him, and he is happy: he and his family are enjoying it. He is one of the most important footballers in Brazil, along with Neymar, and plays box to box, is never injured, and scores goals. He is strong and plays hard, like in England. He would have the strength needed to play in the Premier League."

Adenor Leonardo Bacchi's team, who defeated Egypt's Al Ahly to reach Sunday's final, won this trophy in its former guise back in 2000 but won their first Copa Libertadores this year to earn this opportunity in Japan. They will be cheered on by around 25,000 fans at the Yokohama International stadium, vastly outnumbering Chelsea's own support, many of them having taken extreme measures to make the journey to the Far East.

"Corinthians is a club like no other in the world," said Edu. "The fans are poor people, yet they sell cars to come here, they borrow money from the bank to come here, they lose jobs to take [redundancy benefit] money from the government to come here. I saw one guy outside our stadium who stopped my car and asked me for money. He wanted to borrow five or 10 real. I asked him why and he said: 'I am borrowing money to go to Japan.' He had written down on a piece of paper exactly what everyone had given him so he could pay them back, so he wrote: 'From Edu I borrowed 10 real.' He had a pile of notes 3cm high.

"I gave him some money. There was another guy who injured his legs in a motorbike accident and couldn't walk. He came by wheelchair but he had to come alone because there was no one to help him push the chair. He called the club president and asked for help, so we have helped him come over. Other fans don't have the money to stay in hotels so they've called up the Corinthians fans here in Japan and are staying in their houses for no charge. They are sleeping on the floor like sardines. We have to give something to these fans by winning this trophy."